A Talent For The Invisible (v1.1) Read online

  The invisibility process worked on mechanical men, too. Conger, unseen and unnoticed, walked to the slow rolling wagon and boosted himself up.

  He sat in a spot where he was clear of the container gatherer.

  Over at the nearest wooden gate a San Joaquim brother in a rough earth-brown cassock was pacing in the dust. He had a gleaming snubnose blaster rifle resting on his hip. He halted now, raised his cowl far back and stared at the bright orchards while he wiped the back of his hand across his forehead.

  “Full load, full load,” the long-armed robot told himself. He stretched an arm toward the partially mechanical horse, flicked the animal’s tin ear.

  The horse headed for the rear gate.

  The monk scuffled over and swung the heavy wooden gate out and open.

  The wagon, with Conger sitting invisibly on it, entered the monastery grounds. As the gate slammed shut Conger dropped to the roadway. The road cut through formal gardens, leading to several concentric circles of buildings a thousand feet away.

  Off to Conger’s right three San Joaquim brothers were seated round a raw wood table among blossoming scarlet and gold flowers. None of the three was Colonel Cavala.

  The eldest monk poured something from a beaker into a thimble-size glass, handing it to the brother next to him. “Well, what do you think, Brother Guilherme?”

  Brother Guilherme, who was about forty three, took a careful sip.

  “Yum,” he said, after sloshing the dark brown liquid in his mouth. “Yessir, Brother Joao, that’s the old original incomparable Mizinga flavor sure enough.”

  Brother Joao tapped a ladle against the younger monk’s temple. “ Tonto, that’s Coca Cola.”

  “You could have fooled me.”

  The third brother, a chubby red haired man, said, “He’s never going to make it as a tester, Brother Joao. He’s a loser in the tastebud department.”

  “What about you, Brother Jorge,” demanded Guilherme. “You thought the lemonade left over from Brother Pedro’s mop party was Mizinga. Don’t go casting the first stone.”

  “Brothers, brothers,” cautioned the old monk. “You both must pray for guidance. You must ask St. Norbert, the patron saint of taste, to send you more ability. Especially you, Brother Guilherme, who can’t tell Mizinga from Coca Cola.”

  Brother Guilherme finished off his thimble of Coke. “How can one light candles, to St. Norbert, with that spurious monk Cavala always hanging around in the chapel. He gives me the heebie jeebies.”

  “Now, now, brother. We must all of us learn to relate to the newly risen. For does not our blessed Lord promise that on a day not too distant all the dead will rise up and walk again?”

  Giving a shiver, Brother Guilherme said, “I’m going to have one gigantic case of heebie jeebies when that day comes. Ugh.”

  “Hey,” suggested the red haired brother, “let’s have a shot of the real Mizinga, Brother Joao. All this spooky talk makes my stomach feel funny.”

  Leaving the taste testing group, Conger walked toward the monastery buildings. They were all of the same brindly stone as the walls, tile roofed with wrought iron bars guarding all the windows.

  The chapel lay in the second ring of buildings. A robot gardener was crouched in the flower beds in front of it, touching up the imitation roses with a small bottle of red enamel.

  There seemed to be no one in the cool shadowy chapel. Up at the front was a wide altar with religious statues at each side. To the right of St.

  Joseph Conger noticed a door with a plaque. When he was nearer he read: Shrine of St. Norbert, Patron Saint of Taste & Author of “Quick Cooking With Wine,” “The Fun With Liqueur Cook Book,” etc.

  The thick door stood inches open. Conger gave it a slow push.

  Kneeling in the small alcove room before another altar was a husky man of fifty, wearing the rough brown San Joaquim robe. It was Colonel Macaco Cavala. “How about the new mattress I’ve been praying for?” he was asking the mansize statue of the saint. “A fellow who’s been dead has to take especial care of himself.”

  Conger put a hand into the kit strapped to his side. He drew out what he thought was truth serum, then noticed he’d gotten vitamin A&D capsules instead. He swallowed a couple, before getting out the serum and a silver injection bug from his kit.

  He made his way invisibly across the shrine, slapped the serum-loaded bug against the back of Cavala’s thick neck.

  “What kind of shrine are you running anyway, you let insects nibble on . . .” The resurrected colonel stopped, stiffened.

  “Give me your name,” ordered Conger. He rested his invisible buttocks against the rail guarding the statue of the patron saint of taste.

  Cavala’s dark eyes grew cloudy. “I am Macaco Jose Cavala, former colonel in the People’s Army of Portugal, an unfortunate recent victim of . . .”

  “You’re supposed to be dead.”

  The husky Cavala gave a dazed grin. “I was, I was, unseen senhor. What an experience that was, let me tell you. I’m sure you, whoever you might be, have preconceptions as to what death will actually be like. I know I surely did. Well, in the first place you don’t …”

  “Who brought you back to life?”

  “The Agrarian Espionage Force financed it, bless them,” answered the truth-drugged colonel. “After which, they saw to it I was brought here to bide my time in safety, relative safety. We don’t want to attempt a coup yet, or at least AEF doesn’t. They feel this isn’t the proper season for it. In Portugal summer is a better time for a coup d’état. I have to admit the coup attempted in New Lisbon a few weeks ago by some of my misguided rivals was a complete flopola. However, it seems to me what I have going for me is the miraculous …”

  “Okay, the secret agents from China II picked up the bill,” cut in Conger. “Who did the actual job of bringing you back to life?”

  “They call him Sandman.”

  “Sandman?”

  Cavala, becoming more lax, tipped over into the altar rail. His head bonged against the old dark wood twice before he slid down to lie on his face on the bottom most altar step. “I assume Sandman is a nickname, an ironic nickname,” he murmured. “Since, unlike the sandman of legend and lore, he brings not sleep but awakening. At least, so far …”

  “Who is he?”

  “That I do not know, senhor. I only heard about him after I came back to life. You see, I was dead when he did most of his wonderful work on me. When you’re dead, if I can make myself clear to you on this point, your perceptions are somewhat …”

  “Yeah, okay.” Catching hold of the colonel, Conger propped him against a four-legged rack of votive candles. The tiny dancing flames spread quivering red light over the reanimated man’s broad face. “Have you seen this Sandman guy?”

  “To be perfectly truthful,” said the drugged man, “I saw only his back as he was going out of the laboratory. A relatively tall thin man dressed in a white smock. I’d estimate his age as in the middle thirties, though, as you must understand, my unseen friend, having only just returned to the living I wasn’t noticing all the fine details. You know who he reminded me of?”

  “Who?”

  “Not exactly, but there was a similarity in the gait and the build of Sandman. He reminded me of Sir Thomas Anstey-Guthrie, the noted British neobiologist. I met him at a world science fiction convention in Amsterdam a few years ago. Still, if it were Sir Thomas, why didn’t …”

  “Do you know anything about Sandman’s methods, how he does it?”

  “His methods are marvelous, if you ask me.”

  “I am asking you. Can you give me some specifics, some details!”

  “Alas, no, my friend. I know only that he did things I wouldn’t have thought possible. My wound, for instance, is almost completely gone. I was afraid a hole like that was going to leave a terrible unsightly scar. On the contrary, he was …”

  “Specifically, how did he bring you back?”

  Cavala sighed, sliding again down the steps, his c
assock skirt raveling up around his chubby knees. “I was told no specifics.”

  “You mentioned a laboratory,” Conger reminded him. “Does Sandman’s process involve equipment, drugs, an operation or what?”

  “ Sim, yes. All that and more. As I told you, I was deceased during a good part of the proceedings. Even when one is alive it’s difficult to take in all of what’s going on in a medical situation. I know when I had my tonsils removed shortly after my confirmation I …”

  “Where is Sandman’s lab?”

  “I don’t believe I was at his own personal laboratory. He made use of borrowed facilities, is my impression.”

  “Where?”

  “Some hundred miles from here, on the coast. It was at the lovely villa of Duke Ocasologo,” answered Cavala. “Perhaps you recall the duke’s long dedicated service to our country as Portuguese ambassador to the planet Venus?”

  “Nope,” said Conger. “Whereabouts in the villa did Sandman have his lab set up?”

  “To the best of my recollection it was on the second floor, in a large room with a skylight.”

  “Tell me how to get to the duke’s villa.”

  “Gladly, my friend.” The colonel gave Conger a detailed and lengthy set of instructions on how to reach Duke Ocasologo’s coastal estate.

  Conger clutched the imitation monk under the arms, twisting him up and around. He left him propped in a praying position and went, invisibly, away from the guarded monastery.

  CHAPTER 5

  The lizard man kept discarding carnations. “No, not that one either,” he said. “It clashes with my skin tone, don’t you think?” He was six feet tall, dressed in a one-piece nearsilk tuxedo, and was a scaly seagreen.

  “Perhaps because you’re flushed with excitement,” suggested his human bestman. He produced a purplish carnation from the large white cardboard box he was holding. “Try this one, prince.”

  The seagreen Venusian snorted through his snout. “Oh, it’s even worse than the others.”

  The two men were standing in an arbor on the sunlit afternoon grounds of Duke Ocasologo’s estate. It was the day after Conger’s visit to the monastery and he had just climbed to the top of the unguarded white brick wall which ran along the ocean side of the fifty acre spread. He was invisible again.

  “How about a speckled one? Or here’s a nice chocolate-colored carnation.”

  “No, no.” The lizard prince made a petulant sweep with his hand, knocking the flower box into the air. Two dozen carnations erupted.

  One landed on Conger’s invisible knee. He brushed it away.

  The Venusian prince glanced upward, frowning. “All this shillyshallying over my boutonniere has upset my optic nerves. I have the impression that that ugly pinkish carnation stopped several seconds in midair before falling.”

  “Let’s return to the villa, prince,” said his bestman. “I’m sure we’ll find a flower to your liking in there.”

  “I loathe outdoor weddings,” complained the lizard man as the middle-sized human led him away across the neat grass. “Ah, the nonsensical things diplomacy leads us into.” He rotated his large seagreen head to take one final look at the wall where Conger still sat invisible.

  Dropping to the grass, Conger scanned the grounds of the duke’s villa.

  About two thousand feet away, across rolling lawns and floral islands, rose the Ocasologo home. It was a castle-like building of a soft rose-pink stone.

  A dozen striped tents had been pitched near the villa and a mixed orchestra, part human and part Venusian, was already tuning up in a wide-floored white gazebo.

  Wedding guests were rolling in through the main gate in immense landcars, while more guests dropped out of the gentle blue sky in silver and gold hoppers. Conger noticed the official skycar of the US ambassador to New Lisbon bouncing in for a landing on the hopper pad to the right of the rose-pink villa.

  Freshly oiled robot serving carts were moving out of a lower doorway in the villa. A lizard man in a fawn tuxedo reached for a canape and was warned, “Not until after the ceremony.”

  Conger drifted unseen through the growing crowd, careful not to nudge anyone. A jovial fat Venusian roared happily at the sight of the newly disembarked US ambassador. He extended a blue green hand, which Conger had to dodge, toward him.

  Near the Venusian, her eyes on the warming up orchestra, was a slim young girl. She was about twenty-four, dark, wearing a midthigh formal shift. The dark girl was pretty, in an unconventional way, and Conger had the notion he knew her. Not from a meeting, but from some past briefing at RFA. He gave an invisible shrug and moved on.

  The lizard prince, shouting and waving his scaly hands in the air, was roaming the great entrance hall of the villa. “On my planet we often stick geraniums in our buttonholes.”

  “Very well, very well, principe, “ a bent old man told him. “We’ll teleport you some geraniums in. What shade?”

  “Oh, that would take hours and hours and I’m due to marry that slatternly princess in less than a half hour.”

  “I am the Duke of Ocasologo,” the old man reminded the lizard. “I can procure geraniums, of any shade you so desire, in the winking of an eye.”

  “Scarlet, then,” said the prince.

  Conger climbed a curving marble staircase leading to the villa’s second floor.

  A very thin young lizard woman in a suit of black lace all-season underwear came running down the long carpeted upper hallway. “I can’t go through with it! I can’t go through with it!”

  To avoid her, Conger threw himself against a paneled wall.

  From out a room at the far end of the corridor two plump women, one lizard and one human, came galloping. They gained on the escaping princess, made grabs at her.

  “The orchestra is already tuning up,” reminded the plump lizard woman as she tackled the princess and brought her to her knees.

  “The sandwiches are all made, too,” added the human matron. “1400 of the things.”

  “Ugh, ugh,” said the princess.

  Conger eased by the tangle of women.

  The princess’ mother said, “The prince is very handsome.”

  “He’s a sissy.”

  “That’s only palace scuttlebutt, dear.”

  The corridor branched into two more corridors. Conger chose the one leading to the left. None of the rooms in this wing were occupied. He searched each one. Finally he found the large white room with the vast skylight. Three mourning doves were waddling across the streaked glass.

  The big room was empty.

  “What’s Sandman do?” he asked himself. “Teleport the whole works around with him?”

  Conger sniffed. There was still a faint medical odor in the room and on the bare floor a single tread mark which might have been made by a movable operating table.

  On his second circuit of the room he saw a small green pill lying against the wall next to a puff of dust. It was a kelp pill, like the ones he carried.

  He rubbed it once across his chin, then put it in his kit.

  The rest of the second floor yielded nothing further. Going back to the fork of the corridors, Conger checked out the right hand turning. Only guest rooms there, no skylight, no lab.

  Touching at the kit strapped to his side, he said, “Let’s talk to the old duke.”

  The Duke of Ocasologo was gone from the hall below, as were the prince and his best man.

  Conger heard the prince complaining out on the lawn.

  He spotted the bent old Ocasologo near the band gazebo handing a bundle of sheet music up to the brown lizard band master. “The principe insists you include some Venusian twelve tone wedding tunes,” the duke was saying. Conger moved, unseen, in the direction of the duke. He suddenly had an odd feeling. He halted near a robot sandwich table, frowning invisibly. Somebody was staring at him. Slowly turning his head Conger saw the slim brunette girl. She was looking directly at him.

  Smiling cautiously, she came carefully across the lawn to him and caught
hold of his arm.

  CHAPTER 6

  Barely moving her lips, the slim brunette said, “We ought to talk.” She let go of Conger, turned and walked away.

  He followed.

  The dark girl led him far from the wedding guests, through a grove of lime and lemon trees and into an immense greenhouse. The steamy glass house was filled with tropical plants in long rows of boxes and wood-rib pots. Vines and leaves curled up the walls, tangled round the roof beams.

  The sunlight was mixed with intricate shadow patterns.

  Stopping near the far end of the greenhouse, the girl said, “I take it you didn’t find anything either?”

  “How come you can see me?”’

  She held up both hands and made an identifying gesture. “You recognize that?”

  “It’s the National Security Office highsign,” answered Conger. “How come you can see me?”

  “My name is Angelica Abril. My ID number is 762-3342-AO.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Miss Abril. I’m Jake Conger.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Angelica. “Well, NSO has had a way to overcome the Wild Talents Division’s invisibility trick for nearly six months now.”

  “Splendid.”

  “Didn’t you know that?”

  “Nope.”

  The pretty girl frowned. “That’s sort of odd, Jake. NSO has a policy of informing RFA of everything relevant.”

  “How do you work it?”

  “I’m not really sure. They just gave me a shot.” She rubbed slender fingers along her upper arm. “My theory is they made me immune. You’re one of the better looking invisible men, by the way. I had to work alongside Agent Tate in Upper Montreal last week and he’s a schmuck.” Conger got a packet of vitamin C tablets out. “Does anybody on the other side have this immunity to me?”

  “Which other side?”

  “China II, for instance. One of their agents has been tailing me off and on.”